blog – Page 18 – ben van loon

Dec. 2, 2016

#haiku: little sapling prince bows to the november wind then snaps back, unheard

Dec. 1, 2016

thursday morning smells like cold electricity and warm bodyparts

Over the past two months, I found myself headed out of Chicago every two weeks, first to see family in Boston, then for a long weekend in Venice Beach, and finally, to visit my brother and his girlfriend at their new place in Colorado, about an hour north of Denver. It was my first time in… Continue reading Colorado

An entire city waited beneath them

If you read anything by Peter Hessler, make it Oracle Bones. It’s about the China I one day hope to meet. Here are a few parts I liked: In Anyang, at an archaeological site call Huanbei, a small group of men work in a field, mapping an underground city. The city dates to the fourteenth and… Continue reading An entire city waited beneath them

Now what?

When I went to bed last night, sometime before midnight and after Clinton won Nevada, I knew I was going to wake up to one of two nightmare scenarios: a multi-state recount or a Trump nomination. After a few fitful hours of half-sleep, I checked my phone around 3 a.m. and saw Trump’s official win… Continue reading Now what?

Eddie Award win!

A few weeks ago my work in Sync Magazine was nominated for an Eddie Award and at the awards luncheon in New York earlier this week, I took home the Eddie Award for best technology article.

Venice Beach

I recently took a long weekend to hang out in Venice Beach, the Land of Lebowski. No itinerary. We ate some good food, rode some shitty bikes, stayed in an AirBnB along the canals, hiked to the tallest peak in the Santa Monica Mountains and caught our last dose of Pacific sun before heading back… Continue reading Venice Beach

Full of fine sable

While waiting for one of my favorite restaurants to open on a recent Saturday in Evanston, I killed some time in Market Fresh Books, a used book store that sells by the pound. Buried behind the travel shelf I found a battered copy of Farley Mowat’s The Siberians, which you can get for a penny +… Continue reading Full of fine sable

Babson Boulders

As a native Midwesterner, New England has always seemed full of secrets to me. But none as surreal as the Babson Boulders, a seemingly random collection of massive boulders with inspirational all-caps etchings scattered around the forest of an abandoned inland settlement in Gloucester, Massachusetts. I first learned about the boulders six or seven years… Continue reading Babson Boulders

Eddie Award nomination

I got fun news this week that my article, “The Science of Persuasion,” in Sync magazine was nominated for a 2016 Eddie Award in the B2B technology category. Maybe I’ll win, maybe I won’t. But hey, nice.